Hold Congress Accountable

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Key Vote

As one of our million-plus FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your representative and ask him or her to sign a Republican Study Committee-Tea Party Caucus letter urging House leadership to defund the implementation of ObamaCare. The text of the letter is as follows:

We are outraged by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to rewrite and largely uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ObamaCare”), as we know you are as well. And we know that our sentiments are in line with the vast majority of Americans who believe that healthcare should be controlled by patients and doctors, not by the government.

We appreciate your willingness to schedule a vote on the full repeal of ObamaCare. We should continue efforts to repeal the law in its entirety this year, next year, and until we are successful. However, in the meantime, there is more we can do in Congress.

Since much of the implementation of ObamaCare is a function of the discretionary appropriations process, and since most of the citizens we represent believe that ObamaCare should never go into effect, we urge you not to bring to the House floor in the 112th Congress any legislation that provides or allows funds to implement ObamaCare through the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Health and Human Services, or any other federal entity. We also urge you to take legislative steps necessary to immediately rescind all ObamaCare-implementation funds.

In Federalist No. 58, James Madison wrote that the “power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon ... for obtaining a redress of every grievance…” We thank you for your consideration and look forward to working closely with you to address defunding one of the largest grievances in our time and to restore patient-centered healthcare in America.

Sincerely,

Matt Kibbe President and CEO FreedomWorks[Click here for a PDF version of this letter.]

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Gary Peters votes however Nancy Pelosi and the socialists in the DNC tell him to vote. Hopefully, he will not be holding his seat much longer. Nor will Debbie Stabenow, one of our two communists in the Senate. We're stuck with Carl Levin for a while longer, more's the pity.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on King v. Burwell in June. At issue is whether the Affordable Care Act as written only allows for federal subsidies to go to enrollees in states that operate their own exchanges. Right now, 34 states rely on the federal government to operate the exchanges, meaning a significant amount of subsidies are on the line.

By passing a budget through both the House and the Senate, Congress has moved one step closer to sending a repeal of ObamaCare to the White House. The process to get there is still marked by hurdles, but nothing that can’t be overcome. However, for Congress to take the trouble, they’re going to have to hear from you all the way through the process, lest they choose the path of least resistance – that of doing nothing.

ObamaCare was supposed to reduce the cost of insurance, hence the Affordable Care Act. But is this really what it did? States with less regulations before the law was enacted had more affordable health care costs. Take, for example, North Carolina and Nevada. They saw individual premiums for people in their twenties rise over 150 percent after the law was enacted.

Whew, it’s been a tough week. Looking back on the last five years and all the harm ObamaCare has done to this country is a real downer. In order to head into the weekend on a slightly lighter note, let’s conclude our series with a little frivolity, the five best quotes about ObamaCare.

And the week-long spotlight on ObamaCare’s fifth anniversary keeps rolling right along! Passing the ACA was no easy feat, and Democrats had to make all sorts of outlandish promises to voters and politicians alike in order to advance the president’s government takeover of health care.

One of the features of any big government program is the inevitable catering to special interests, and exemptions for well-connected parties. ObamaCare is more egregious in this regard than most laws. As the week-long mourning of ObamaCare’s five year anniversary continues, here are the five dimensions of ObamaCare’s cronyism in action.

Rarely has such a major piece of legislation as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) been passed in such an overwhelming partisan way. Without garnering a single Republican vote, ObamaCare was rammed down the throats of the American people, even though a majority opposed - and continue to oppose - the law.

Monday marks the fifth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act - AKA ObamaCare - being signed into law. Since that fateful day, Americans have been faced with fewer health care choices, higher prices, and burdensome mandates that have made an already tangled health care bureaucracy exponentially worse.

A good law needs to be clear, concise and open to debate throughout the entire lawmaking process; ObamaCare had none of these things. Since public opinion was opposed to ObamaCare from the start, the law was forced through Congress with no time to debate. Now, it appears to be up to the courts and executive orders to try to fix the many problems with the bill.

It is difficult to predict how the Supreme Court will rule in any case it takes up, even after oral arguments; King v. Burwell is no different. It is probably safe to assume that Justices Scalia, Alito and Thomas will rule for the petitioner (King) and that Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayer and Kagan will rule for respondent (Burwell), but it is difficult to judge which way Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Kennedy will rule. This being said, oral arguments still brought some interesting insight from the Court.